Platform encourages all contributions related to media studies, with special consideration given to engagement with the cultures, politics and social issues layered within automation and transparency.

The freedoms of control that circulate in the digital networked society imbue modalities of both transparency and automation. The coupling of high technological automation with a heightened sense of surveillance implies certain forms of automated conduct as necessary, but not sufficient, for autonomy in spatiotemporal, psychological, economic and aesthetic dimensions of subjectivity and polity. Thus, locating autonomy, automation and transparency in the network becomes a critical project in both respects of the word. After WikiLeaks, can freedom be a creature of the light or the dark? Is autonomy found in the open or in the hidden and unique?

What are the critical responses to automated agents that ubiquitously categorise and increasingly contribute to the construction of our social-world and its boundaries? How do they create terror and police the social, while effectively engaging themselves in ‘boundary work’? Together, automation and transparency create: issues of privacy in surveillance for mediated and inhabited spaces, asymmetries of access and temptation (e.g. online shopping & dating), and fundamental implications for literacy, living, and society.

We encourage contributors to ask what opacities, reflexes, subjectivities and politics are available in what Robert Samuels (2009) terms ‘automodernity’ as society approaches indistinguishability between either of David Brin’s (1996) allegorical cities of automated transparency?

PLATFORM encourages the submission of empirical and theoretical work engaging with these themes of freedom, control, transparency and automation including but not limited to:

-Automation and/or transparency as a facet of everyday life

-New technologies of automation and transparency and their affect on artists, protesters, publishers, and the police;

-Methodological considerations for automation and/or transparency in research

-Other critiques working across diverse fields in media and communication studies are welcome

We recommend that prospective authors submit abstracts well before the abstract deadline of April 26, 2012 to allow for feedback and suggestions from the editors. All submissions should be from early career researchers (defined as being within a few years of completing their Ph.D) or current graduate students undertaking their Masters, Ph.D. or international equivalent.

All eligible submissions will be sent for double-blind peer-review. Early submission is highly encouraged as the review process will commence on submission.

Note: Please read the Submission Guidelines before submitting work. Submissions not in house style will not be accepted and authors will be asked resubmit their work with the correct formatting before it is sent for review.

PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication is a fully refereed, open-access online graduate journal. Founded and published by the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne (Australia), PLATFORM was launched in November 2008.

PLATFORM is refereed by an international board of established and emerging scholars working across diverse fields in media and communication studies, and is edited by graduate students at the University of Melbourne.

PLATFORM invites graduate students working in disciplines related to media studies to submit to the journal. We also welcome applications for editorial positions as well as proposals to guest edit a special issue of the journal. For more information and to apply, please contact us at platformjmc@gmail.com.